Tea and a Mag Part two

"You look quite tanned," notes Lisa, who's doing his make-up. "Do you tan at all?"

"Only when my freckles join up," he says.

In Sergeant Nicholas Brody, Homeland may have given us the most problematic leading man in TV history: a US Marine who prays to Allah in his garage and blithely stashes a suicide bomb in the family station wagon while his kids go for pizza. Debuting less than a month after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it was too much for some Americans. Even those who liked it sometimes felt they had to ask permission to do so. Lewis recalls people coming up to him in the street saying, "You're a guy who is going to blow up the vice-president, you're lying to your wife and you just generally scare the hell out of us. Yet, we oddly kind of like you. ..."

There's no doubt Homeland has taken TV to new places. Its plot involving the cover-up of Iraqi civilian casualties following a drone strike prompted an op-ed piece in The New York Times comparing it to real US foreign policy. One critic said it gave al-Qaeda "an almost dangerously fair hearing".

"It does tap into that greatest of American traditions, which is the pervasive paranoia that exists in that country," Lewis says. "You're constantly being told you're being invaded. The American dream was forged on the idea that you are able to find a piece of land, make your own home and then you have a right to protect it. And at the same time worship the Lord, fear God and kill people if they try to kill you, which is quite a confused message."

That hardly dented its global appeal: Homeland has been a hit in 40 countries, from Afghanistan to Vietnam. Developed by two alumni from 24 and The X-Files and vaguely based on the Israeli television drama Hatufim (Prisoners Of War), the team always had Claire Danes in mind for the part of bipolar, weepy CIA officer Carrie Mathison, but struggled to find their Brody.

 That person had to be believable both as a soldier and a Congressman. They had to look all-American. Several big names passed, especially when it wasn't clear they'd be playing the good guy. Then someone remembered Keane, a 2004 independent movie about a father dealing with his daughter's abduction in which Lewis turned in an amazing performance as a man wobbling on the edge of insanity and despair, one that required him to hang around New York's Port Authority bus terminal incessantly talking to himself and generally weirding people out.

In fact, Lewis already had history in long-form US TV drama. Spielberg's 11-hour, $80m Second World War miniseries Band Of Brothers aired on HBO in 2001, putting fellow Brits Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy and Tom Hardy in front of US audiences, and putting Lewis and his flawless American accent in the leading role as Major Richard D. Winters, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. That was folllowed in 2006 by Life, starring Lewis as wounded, brooding detective Charlie Crews, released from prison after 12 years for murders he didn't commit, which won the American Film Institute Award for best television series.

As it turned out, that last one counted against him. Life ran for two seasons and 32 episodes but was not considered a hit. "For so long, NBC had been at the top of the ratings with ER, Seinfeld and Friends and unfortunately when we were doing Life, it was resting on the bottom and trying to find quick fixes," Lewis says. Even after executives at Homeland's cable channel Showtime were persuaded to give Lewis a call, his agent almost lost him the gig.

"I was filming in Manchester in December in that unbelievable snow we had three years ago," he says. "I was stuck in my hotel with them saying, 'We need a decision'. And I couldn't get hold of [wife] Helen." Lewis had read one episode. As is the way of these things, on this he was expected to make a decision to move back to L.A. He called his agent back, though an hour later than agreed.

"I said, 'I think I'm going to say yes,'" he recalls. "He went, 'What? Really? What do you mean yes? I've passed'. And I went, 'What? No, you haven't passed. I've just been through the wringer with Helen trying to work out whether we should do this one or not, as a family'."